Sermon Transcript
Well, we’re going to look at a passage of Scripture this morning that just speaks to this whole matter of preparation for the coming of Jesus Christ, readiness on His Church’s part for Jesus’ coming. So, if you have your Bible, you might want to open it up and turn with me to 2 Timothy. We’re at the very beginning of chapter 3, 2 Timothy chapter 3. As I was looking at this passage, I thought back to that saying, the axiom that says, life would be easy if it wasn’t for people. You’ve probably heard that.
You’ve probably seen that in reality. Most of us have unfortunately had to deal with that, maybe in our lives or the lives of others. It’s kind of up there on the list of every parent’s greatest challenge. People, people, little people in this case as parents who— these little people who love to do their own thing, like all over the house, not just in, you know, one room, the bedroom, because little people can be messy everywhere they go in the house. Go ahead, take a tour of a house where there are toddlers.
And you will see for yourselves the mess that kids can make all over the house. There are usually signs everywhere. If you have young kids, if your kids are normal, there will be evidence throughout the house that the kids can be really messy. And if you clean up after your kids, if you take the time to make things look good, if you tidy up, you know it won’t stay that way for long. In fact, it’s one of the laws of parenting: toys plus fascination plus desire plus selfishness equals A mess.
Kids have a built-in propensity for leaving messes, and then after they finish one mess, they just move on, leave that mess in their wake as they have to do the next thing. Well, guess what? We as adults can do the same thing, and not just with our toys. We tend to leave a lot of messes in our lives because of selfishness and self-centeredness and really just sinfulness and the impact of that sin. Can leave messes in a lot of different areas of life outside the church, but even in the church.
It would be great if the church would be the one place where, you know, things would be different. There would be no messes here. Sin would never raise its ugly head, and the church would just be clean, nice and clean, you know, no messes, just beauty and serenity. And peace and love and happiness all the time. No dirt.
If only. But the reality is the sin of selfishness has been showing up in the church ever since the church began. And the sin of selfishness has continued to affect the church because every new person who joins up in the church is an imperfect person. And that’s the problem. We are a group of imperfect people.
I’m imperfect, you’re imperfect, so that’s just kind of like built in, isn’t it? And the problem is, is that oftentimes we love ourselves more than we love others, and even worse, we love ourselves more than we love God, who is our Maker and our Savior and our Provider.
Having said that, we’re going to read together this little passage here found in 2 Timothy chapter 3, because if you want to talk about a mess, This mess that the church was in was awful, and yet it can happen in churches.
And the reality of it, I hope, as we think about this, it will have some kind of impact on us as individuals and as a church as we think about the people that God wants His church to be and the readiness that God wants His church to have even before His coming. So, 2 Timothy 3, this is where Paul began in writing to Timothy. He said, Mark this, but mark this, there will will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God. Now, that’s a mess.
It’s a mess that exists outside the church. But it’s a mess that even oftentimes exists in the church. It’s produced by terrible times in the last days. Notice that in verse 1. That doesn’t sound good.
Those 2 words, terrible times. Terrible is a word in the classical Greek that describes a dangerous animal that might be snarling at you or snapping at you, an animal that you’d like to avoid, or a raging sea. It was used to describe a raging sea where you try— If you’re in a little boat, you’re trying desperately to not be tossed out of your little boat or to have it wipe out your really nice beach house, if you have a beach house. Matthew chapter 8, this word describes a demon-possessed man that was so fierce that nobody could control him. So this is the terrible we’re talking about.
And the word times there points to these awful seasons or repetitive cycles of distress. So here you have life. And life since the fall has been marked by terrible times, but this is specific to the last days, the last days. What’s the last days? Well, biblically, when you look at this concept of last days, the last days actually began with Jesus coming, and it’s a period of time that extends all the way through His second coming.
And this period of time, we’re told, is going to increase and becoming even more terrible over a period of time, kind of like a woman who’s in labor pains, who it’s going to get especially terrible or especially difficult. Well, Paul is writing to Timothy to say this, and he says, mark this, mark this, the terrible times that are coming in the last days are going to be marked by 2 things. And this is kind of, if you will, the beginning of what he’s saying here and the end of what he wants to say about the problem with love in these terrible times. Is that verse 2, people will be lovers of themselves. Do you see that in verse 2?
Might want to jot a note there or mark it down. People will be lovers of themselves, and then go down to verse 4, rather than, he says, lovers of God. There’s the problem. Why are we in the mess that we’re in? Because people will be lovers of themselves rather than lovers of God.
And those 2 conditions aren’t just describing people outside the church, they’re also describing to some degree people in the church, and that tragic reality is why the world is messed up.
That’s it. Why are the times terrible? Because we love ourselves more and we love God less. We’re into loving ourselves more than we love God. We love God less than we love ourselves.
That’s the problem. So, like a parent can follow the trail of clothes, and toys, and cookie crumbs, and sticky somethings on the floor to the culprit of the messy home, we can follow a trail of these terrible times, and it all comes back to people loving themselves more and loving God less. That, friends, is the problem. So, let’s talk about that. Our love of self above the love of God is at the root of the mess that we’re in.
So, let’s call it love gone bad. All right, love gone bad. And what you have here are several traits, in fact, around 18 traits, verses 2 to 4, of this love gone bad. This love gone bad, I’m just going to summarize it in 3 words this morning. This love gone bad is, first of all, Narcissistic.
Narcissistic, yeah, self-centered. It’s self-absorbed. It’s what’s in focus in verse 2 and 4 where it says people are going to be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive. Verse 4, conceited, lovers of pleasure. So you got love of self that begins the list.
Life revolves around me, myself, and I. We sometimes refer to this as the unholy trinity. This is the person who’s into themselves in every way. It’s kind of like a kid who isn’t thinking about anybody else. When this kid leaves a mess everywhere with no thought for others, only for himself or herself and what they want to do.
Well, this is the person who sees life only through themself. So there’s the love of self. That’s the big part of the problem. But there’s also the love of money that kind of follows. More money, more opportunity to do my wants, my desires, satisfy my needs.
Often without any thought of anybody else and their wants and needs. Life is focused on self-gratification, self-consumption. The thought of giving money away, not even on the list. And then there, verse 4, since we’re talking about love of self and love of money, well, let’s jump down to verse 4. There’s love of pleasure.
Love of pleasure. And this is a compound Greek word, comes from the word philos. You’ve heard that word before. Philos, love, or Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love. So you got philos And then you got hedon, hedon, the word that also is here for love.
And then you got pleasure. So the love of pleasure, hedonist or hedonism, hedonistic pleasure. You put them together, sensual pleasure. Life for many people is just one big happy party. Jump back to verse 2.
They’re into boasting, boasting about themselves, about all their accomplishments, all their awards. They love to squeeze into conversations Stuff about what they’ve done and what they’re doing right now. They are the heroes of their stories. These are people who are proud, verse 2. They have an overinflated sense of their importance.
They think that they’re God’s gift to the world, and they want others to know and acknowledge that. Going along with that would be conceit. You see that down in verse 4. They’re literally— the word conceited is they’re literally swollen, swollen with conceit or Or we say they’re puffed up. They’re full of themselves into their own importance and intelligence and wit and appearance and all a lot more stuff.
And then verse 2, and they’re abusive. They speak disrespectfully about and to others. They put others down in order to exalt their sense of superiority. They hurt others by their words or their bullying behavior, but they really don’t care. Now, all of those are signs narcissistic love.
No thought of others, self-love gone mad, selfishness on display. The question that narcissists ask isn’t, what can I do for you? It’s more, what can you do for me? It’s all about me. Now, if you think that that’s not a problem in our world, I encourage you just to walk around alert.
Just be alert to what’s happening around you. You’ll see it. You’ll see selfishness. You’ll see it in yourself. You’ll see it in others.
Just today, just be conscious of this today. How much selfishness is showing up? Yesterday I took a walk through Cuesta Park. I took a walk on a walking path, a walking path, okay? And there were these bicyclists that were coming toward me.
There were 2 adults on bicycles coming toward me on the walking path. And I’m thinking, surely since they’ve got the whole sidewalk, you know, they’ve got the whole walking path, I’m thinking surely they’re gonna at least, you know, they’re— because they’re next side by side, about the size of this aisle here, they’re about side by side. I’m walking toward them, I’m trying to find a place to walk here, right? So they’re coming toward me, I’m thinking surely they’re gonna, they’re gonna part company or something, you know, let me through the middle, or they’re gonna go single file or something like that. Guess what?
They didn’t. They didn’t. I’m lucky I’m here this morning. They didn’t do that. Why would they not do that?
Well, because there’s a little bit of narcissism in there. It’s like, hey, this is our path, right? Well, it’s my path too. Can we share the path? I encourage you, just look around and see how often selfishness shows up.
Where people are thinking about themselves, they’re not thinking about anybody else often, thinking about themselves. Love gone bad is also flawed. Timothy points out 5 signs of flawed, faulty, deficient love, love that is the exact opposite of what God wants. So that’s why he uses the un- word. You know, you hear uncola.
Well, this is unlove, or dis, D-I-S. 5 traits of The wrong kind of love, love gone bad. Disobedient, verse 2, they’re disobedient to their parents. They’re ungrateful. They’re unholy. They’re without love.
Some of the translations here would say unloving. And then they’re unforgiving. So disobedient, they could care less what their parents think or what others want. All they want is what their desires are, and so they’re not about to obey somebody. You can see this in toddlers who are oftentimes into themselves.
They’re asked to do something, I don’t want to do it. Where did that come from? Did their parents teach them, hey, you just be a rebellious little kid? I’m going to— no, the parents aren’t teaching them that. It’s just part of our problem, isn’t it?
Inflicted. We get inflicted with selfishness. They’re ungrateful, verse 2, or unthankful. I love it when a young child, without being prompted, says, thank you, thank you. They just say thank you.
You know, you give them something and they say thank you. Now that tells me somebody’s been working with this child. They’ve been teaching them something really important. Humans tend to be inherently ungrateful. And what I’d love to see is that more of us choose not to be a part of the ungrateful crowd.
But that we are people that when we ask others to do something, we say thank you. If we’ve asked somebody to do something for us by way of email, we send an email reply that says thank you after they do whatever it is that we’ve asked. Wouldn’t that be great? You know what? Just that one thing would cause you to stand out from a number of other people who do things for others, but nobody ever says thank you.
And every time we say thank you, we would take a step away from feelings of entitlement. That would be good. The problem with love is people often are ungrateful, and they’re also unholy. It doesn’t matter what God wants or what God says is right and good. What matters is what they want, what I want.
I want to satisfy my lusts and my passions, and what matters most to me is not what God thinks, it’s what I think. And they’re without love, or the word unloving. Some of the translations use the word heartless or inhuman or unfeeling. Felix translation says utterly lacking in normal human affections. These people are utterly lacking in normal human affections.
They could care less what other people think or how others feel. They let their unfiltered actions and words fly. Without any concern about the damaging impact on other people. And they’re unforgiving, verse 3. Unappeasable, they’re callous, they’re unreasonable, they’re unwilling to let things go or to cancel unpaid debts and transfer the debt collection to God.
Not in their thinking. They’re going to hold it against the person. There’s a lack of forgiveness that oftentimes can turn a person into, guess what? Bitter, a bitter person. Flawed love.
So here you have a picture of flawed love that needs to be replaced, and it needs to be replaced by genuine love that’s obedient and grateful and pure and empathetic and forgiving. That’s God’s desire. That’s real love. Talk about an improvement. Talk about an upgrade.
You ever taken your car in for tires? You ever gone in because you had some flawed tires? Tires, you know, your tread on the tires was too low or there’s some other problems with the tires or whatever, and you asked the person there at the store, should I replace the tires? And without question, the person said, yep, you better replace them. Did you replace them or not?
You probably replaced them unless you don’t care about the people you carry around in your car, because replacing tires to me is one of the cheapest ways that you can ensure the safety of your passengers. One of the cheapest ways. And so if we really care about the passengers that are in our cars, then maybe we’ll go ahead and make sure that we don’t have flawed tires on our car because we care about others. Well, here’s a much-needed exchange. You got this flawed love in life, and God is saying, I don’t want that.
You need to replace that. Genuine love. Love gone bad is narcissistic, narcissistic, flawed, and it’s ruthless. It’s ruthless. It’s slanderous, verse 3.
Without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, rather than lovers of God. Slanderous. What’s that? This word is the word diabolos. What does that sound like?
The devil. It’s the word that we get devil from, the English word devil. The word is used 34 times in the New Testament to describe God’s enemy who spreads slander, is into condemnation, is malicious in accusation. Slanderers enjoy Spreading gossip and malicious reports about others. They— in other words, they do the devil’s work and they don’t even think about it.
And this love is without self-control. These people can’t restrain their actions, feelings, or words. The word calls out somebody who’s shamelessly immoral. They jettison inhibitions and shame for the purpose of self-satisfaction, self-gratification. There’s no line that they won’t cross.
And they’re brutal, brutal. Verse 3, people are like untamed animals. Uncivilized people. It’s in their nature to attack others and to tear them to pieces. They’re insensitive and crude and even savage and cruel.
It’s even hard to believe how this can happen in families, but it does, where family members treat each other in brutal ways. And they’re treacherous, verse 4. Treacherous people are traitors. They betray others for the purpose of self-advancement. They’re known to stab others in the back, even past friends.
And they’re rash or they’re reckless, verse 4. They could care less how others are hurt by their words or actions. That’s of no concern to them because all they think about is what they want. They’re bent on getting their way at any cost. And if others get in the way, well, so what?
It’s not a great list, is it? And yet we hear about this kind of thing all the time. Turn on the news. How often do you turn on the news or you read on your app or whatever your news app about abuse in the home, husbands and wives abusing each other, parents and children abusing each other, even in fact to the point of— this week, even to the point of murder. Ruthless behavior is so common that we constantly see it in the headlines.
And it’s not just out there, you could see it around here. I was told on Friday by a mother who has a daughter who’s just started driving. She’s a junior. She goes to Los Altos High School, but for some reason she went over to Mountain View High School to do something over there. And so she drove over there alone, and it was just about at the time, you know, when everybody’s like getting out of school and things are crazy over there, and there’s a whole line of cars coming out from school and she’s going in.
So it wasn’t really a problem for her, but these cars are all lined up, and as she was going in, there was a father who decided he did not want to wait in the line. So he made a lane in the middle. Okay, there wasn’t a lane in the middle, but he made a lane in the middle. He came down the middle. She’s coming in.
She’s a brand new driver. She’s never seen this before. I promise you that we don’t— any of us ever want to see this. She’s coming in. She doesn’t know what to do, so she swerves to the right as far as she can without, you know, going over the curb and other things.
She swerves to the right, and this father clips the side of her car, scratches the entire car, all the way down. I said, well, did he stop? She said, yes, he did. Did he say anything? The answer, no.
He didn’t say anything. He had in his car with him his daughter who he picked up and 2 other students from Mountain View High School, and he didn’t say a thing. But the daughter who was in the car came over to this junior who’s like, you know, emotional now with what has just happened there, and that daughter apologized to this girl for the behavior of her father, who was ruthless. Ruthless— in what sense? He could care less about what others were doing.
He had nobody else in mind but himself, right?
So we kind of look at this and say, yeah, those people out there, they ought to get it together, whatever. This can happen to every one of us. It often stems from godless behavior rather than lovers of God. To me, that’s kind of the root cause for Love gone bad. There’s no place for God, no thought of God, so God isn’t transforming our lives through his power, through the work of the Holy Spirit.
When self-love reigns supreme, God’s demoted to a lesser place or disregarded altogether, and the one who should be loved the most, guess what, is loved the least. And who pays for it? The world pays for it, the church pays for it, and that’s why we’re in the mess that we’re in. There it is.
But when it comes to the church, what happens in the church, God deeply cares about. But sometimes in the church, this whole self-love thing isn’t obvious because people can live with what Paul calls, verse 5, the beginning of verse 5, they can live with a form of godliness. Do you see that? A form of godliness. What’s a form of godliness?
Well, one is it’s empty of God’s power. You see it there. God is not working in them in a transformative way. And when you look at these people, they come to the church. I hope this isn’t you, but it could be any one of us.
At first glance, they may look like somebody who loves God because they have adapted a form of godliness. They may look like Christians. They may talk like Christians. They may worship like Christians. They may pray like Christians, fast like Christians, give like Christians, dress like Christians, smile like Christians, even sing like Christians.
They may even carry a Bible like Christians.
Oh, wait a minute, we don’t do that much anymore. But anyway, we used to. They may even read the Bible like Christians, but it’s all an empty performance. It’s just a show. There’s a form.
You see the word form there? It means a shadow, a shape, a silhouette of Christianity, but it’s only skin deep. It’s skin-deep religion. There’s nothing on the inside. Nothing.
So how do you know if somebody is or isn’t the real thing in the church? Well, he gives us 2 revealing behaviors of spiritual people who are messed up. Verse 6, they are the kind who worm their way into homes and gain control over weak-willed women who are loaded down with sins and are swayed by all kinds of evil desires, always learning but never able to acknowledge the truth.
I encourage you to highlight or underline the word control and maybe the word gain also. How do you know this person is a religious phony? One of the ways you may know is because they gain control over others. And to make the point, Paul brings up the matter of spiritual maturity in the church, and he recognizes that in the church there are people at different places of spiritual growth and transformation. And in this case, Paul calls attention to some weak-willed women who are a part of the church at Ephesus.
Now please, he is not saying that all women are weak-willed. He’s saying that some women in this church at Ephesus were weak-willed. Come on, there are weak-willed men in every church too. If you ask me, there are more weak-willed men in the church, but I’m not going to get into that because that would be a hornet’s nest and I don’t want to go there today. But that aside, get Paul’s point here.
There were women in the church at Ephesus that were morally weak. They were— notice the words that are used here— they were loaded down, loaded down with the burden of a guilty conscience. They were easily swayed by all kinds of evil desires, meaning to satisfy fleshly desires, to maybe be loved by somebody, to escape loneliness through companionship. All of that could have been a part of their lifestyle. They were into learning the truth, God’s Word, but they were never able— see these words?
They were never able to acknowledge the truth. That’s to say what they knew was not translated into what they did. It was a struggle for them to take what they were learning and translate it into a walk of truth. They did not learn to practice walking in the power of the Holy Spirit. And, of course, if you’ve been around Christianity for a while, you know that it’s not automatic that you hear something and all of a sudden you just do it, like, I got this kind of thing.
We can all struggle with taking what it is that we know to be true and actually living it out. But in this case, the progress of these weak women was that they were being— their progress was being thwarted, we could say, by the religious fakes, by the men who were driven by, verse 8, depraved minds. They had depraved minds, and these depraved minds evidently motivated them to go after women who could be seductively controlled. The word control. Have you ever seen that in Christianity?
You ever seen that in the church? Religious people preying on the weak in order to get money, or in order to get love, or in order to build their empire by promising the weak something in return. So if you just send some money in, God’s going to answer your prayers, or he’s going to bless you financially, or you’re going to be healed, or whatever it is. And these religious parasitic worms— notice the word worms here— were inflicting harm on people in the church. They were dominating, perhaps.
They were badgering others, perhaps, with their words. They were intimidating others, even threatening others, all a part of this lack of love that’s pictured here. And they would be hard to get rid of because they were worms. You ever had a worm in your computer? Did you find it easy to get rid of it?
I’ve never found it easy. I had a worm in my computer a couple of years ago. I tried everything I knew to do, and I couldn’t get rid of it, so I had to call in somebody. It cost a bunch of money to get rid of the worm. You ever had a worm in your body?
This is bad too. I had a worm in my body after I went on a missions trip. I’m not saying to go on missions trips, please, please do not. I knew it, you know, I knew that would happen to me, I’m not going. But it took a long time to get rid of the parasite that was in my body.
They can gain control, and here’s— that’s the picture. They gain control over others, these religious frauds, these religious charlatans. They can gain control over others. But then, even to help people understand a little bit more, he then goes on and says this in verse 8: Just as Jannes and Jambres opposed Moses, so also these men oppose the truth, men of depraved minds who, as far as the faith is concerned, are rejected. Now, you probably haven’t heard of these guys.
I had never heard of them either, because the fact of the matter is you can’t find their names anywhere else in the Bible. But most people link them to the account of the Exodus, where just before the Exodus, you may remember that God sent a spiritual leader. His name was Moses. And Moses was given by God that it was going to be his task to call the people, the Pharaoh, to let the Egyptians— were to let the Israelites go. So he said, you know, I want you to let my people go.
He gave them that message. And they, in essence, said no. So, Moses went back to God, had a conversation with God about all of this, and God sent back with Moses 10 audiovisual presentations, in educational jargon, which another way of saying it is 10 plagues, to prove that his God was greater than their god, the gods that they worshiped. And they were multi-theists, so they worshiped the god of everything. God of frogs, they worshiped that god, so forth.
So the first, the first miracle that was done was done by Aaron. You remember Aaron took Moses’ staff and he threw it down and became a snake. Remember this? That was pretty impressive until Pharaoh called in all the other magicians. And evidently among those magicians was Jannes and Jambres.
And these guys came in, they were part of this big old show to prove that their god was great and even greater than the God that Moses worshiped. So they had some staffs and they threw their, their canes, their whatever they were, they threw them down and they all became these snakes. So now you got all these snakes and that was cool. People that probably were there were, you know, on that side were saying, haha, you know, we got them, we got them, man. We’re worshiping the right god.
Yeah, except that Moses’ snake, the god of the, the great god Elohim God, Yahweh God, that God, you know what he ended up doing? He ate up all the other snakes. This snake ate up all the other snakes, which was a demonstration of God’s power is greater than Satan’s power. Well, that fits the situation of the church at Ephesus, and for that matter, it fits the situation here in the church at Los Altos, where God wants to work miracles in the lives of people, beginning with the miracle of salvation and continuing with the miracle of transformation. He wants to bring people to faith and he wants to grow them to faith, but here’s the deal, there’s always going to be opposition to that, just like there was opposition to that in Moses’ day.
And this opposition often comes in the way of minimizing the truth. God didn’t really say that. Are you kidding? Your God’s a nothing God. And evidently in this church, not only had these religious frauds sought control over others, they had also opposed— verse 8— they had opposed biblical truth.
And instead of surrendering their wills to the truth, instead of living under the truth, they lived above the truth. Instead of submitting to the truth, they deviated from the truth by reinterpreting the truth to satisfy their plans and their desires. Now, let me ask you, you ever seen that in the church? You ever seen professing believers living as practical atheists? Where they say that they believe in God, but their actions show otherwise.
Where they say they believe in God’s inspired, infallible, sufficient, always relevant Word of God, but the reality is they don’t believe in God’s Word. That’s obvious by how they live. They conveniently— listen— they conveniently ignore, dismiss, or minimize biblical truth. Which is to ignore God. It’s to ignore him.
It’s not out of love of God. Their focus is more on themselves than it is on God and doing what’s right in their own eyes instead of doing what’s right in God’s eyes. A couple of weeks ago, my wife Bernice was sitting in a Peet’s Coffee shop enjoying some alone time and actually doing a study on the history of the church. And while she was sitting there alone at this table, an elderly man came over and sat down at her table. At her table.
This doesn’t happen usually, right? Coffee shops. But anyway, this elderly man sat down and she thought, well, that’s kind of odd, but maybe this is a divine interruption. So she said hello to the guy and asked him how his day was going, and he started into a conversation. He just kept on going and going and going, and he even jumped into a conversation about spiritual things, and he had a lot of opinions.
Bernice said. So Bernice very gently tried to show him how his opinions contradicted the truth of God’s Word, but he just kept going back to his own opinions because he said he and his religion were the ones who were right. That’s what he said to Bernice. Now she at this point didn’t say, I’m a pastor’s wife.
She just kept taking him back to Scripture. And after a while, she realized that this guy didn’t care really about what the Bible taught. But there was this girl who was sitting at the table like right next door. You know, these tables were really close to each other, and she was sitting at the table throughout this whole conversation. So no doubt, even though she was, quote, reading, she was hearing things that were happening at this table over here.
In fact, There was another person who was over there at that table before who, once this whole thing got going, he got up and went to some other table. He was like, I’m out of here. But she stayed there, and so Bernice thought, she’s hearing this guy speaking all of this untrue stuff. So she said, I stayed at it because I really wanted this girl next door to hear the truth, and so I kept on explaining the truth to this guy so that she, at the very least, could hear it. Well, that’s the point, isn’t it?
It’s the truth, and the truth must be heard, and the truth must be embraced, especially in these last times where there are going to be more and more professing believers that worm their way into churches and religious circles and maybe even coffee shops who propagate error like they did in Timothy’s day in order that their truth might be heard, not God’s. So, Timothy, Paul is saying, watch out for spiritual worms who seek to gain control over others and who oppose biblical truth. You’ve got to watch out. In fact, he even goes so far as to give him a couple of very important ways to respond. 2 Timothy 3:5, how should he respond?
He was— verse 5, the last part— he was to have nothing to do with them. He was to have nothing to do with them. I want you to think about that. He was to avoid religious worms. Now, I don’t know how we’re doing on taking that kind of counsel to heart.
That’s not your usual counsel. After all, Jesus calls us to make time for sinners, to hang out with sinners, to be a friend of sinners like Jesus was. But this is different. This really is different. This is talking about a religious worm, a religious phony, a charlatan, somebody who is intent on having his will be done, somebody who’s been taught and admonished and corrected, and yet the truth hasn’t sunk in, and so they continue in their self-centered, godless ways and interpretations of God’s Word, and they’re built on building their kingdom, not God’s.
Their agenda is see their kingdom come on earth, not God’s kingdom come on earth even as it is in heaven. And this person, Paul says to Timothy, That person is to be avoided. Don’t give them your precious time. Don’t give them a place where the church is gathered to propagate their self-centered ways. Don’t let them do that or they’re going to do damage on God’s children and they’re going to do damage on God’s church.
Avoid them, and if that means putting them out of your midst, then put them out. Sad you have to do that in some situations, but that’s better to protect the Word and the work of God. Second response he brings into focus is found in verse 9, but they will not get very far. These religious frauds, they’re not going to get very far because as in the case of those men, Jannes and Jambres, their folly will be clear to everybody. Everybody’s going to see it.
So anticipate their demise. Live with a sense of anticipation that this person’s work and what they’re doing, Ultimately, they’re going to be judged for this. Truth will be vindicated. Their folly, their religious beliefs, their systems, their practices, it’s all going to be ultimately revealed for what it is. And what is it?
It’s a sham. It’s a scam. They might deceive others now, but they’re not going to continue to deceive others forever. In fact, they’re certainly not going to deceive God. Judgment Day is coming, and one day everybody’s going to see the truth.
And while we wait for that day, however, We gotta be careful. We gotta be careful. ‘Cause there are people can infiltrate our midst, try to steer us away from the truth that’s found in God and the love of him and the love that he wants for our lives. I got a feeling you are like me about scams. You’re probably wishing they would just go away forever, especially email scams or spam.
Or for that matter, why don’t we add in robocalls? Just like to get rid of it all, right? Come on, stop. For the good of everybody, enough is enough. Somebody just needs to put a stop to all of the scams and the spams and the calls.
The sooner the better. And really, that’s what Paul is telling Timothy to do. He’s just saying, you’ve got to deal with the lies and the scams that are in the church. You have to put a stop to it for good, for everybody’s good. Take steps to eradicate religious worms that are inflicting harm or could inflict harm on the church before they shut the good work down that God is doing there.
Step in and do what needs to be done so that the body of Christ will be healthy. That’s the point. That’s how much God cares about His church. And to say that’s how much God cares about His church is to say that’s how much He cares about every member of his church. Because when we’re adopted into God’s family, we become his church individually and collectively.
We gather together. God cares deeply about his church, and he wants his church to become greater lovers. He wants them to become selfless, not selfish. And so this action that Paul calls Timothy to isn’t just an action for pastors. It isn’t just an action for a Timothy-like person.
This is an action for everybody who cares about the church, anybody who loves the church, anybody who longs for the church— listen— to be the radiant bride, the radiant bride that God wants his church to be. That’s a bride to be protected, cared for. And when that bride is cared for and protected, everybody benefits. Church benefits, the name of God benefits, the world benefits, and God’s kingdom comes on earth a little more as we walk in his will for our lives. Well, let’s pray.
Father, thanks for this time to just contemplate scriptures that speak right to where we are, even as a church to this day, and yet But in thinking about these are last times, then all the more is it possible for religious frauds to come into the church who have a form of Christianity but not the reality. And so, Lord, we pray that You would give us discernment, You would give us hearts filled with the truth that could know the difference between right and wrong. You would give us humble spirits to know the truth, to surrender to your will. May we not be among those who would ignore you and, and live as if you don’t even exist. But may we live in vibrant relationship with you that’s transforming us into the people that you want us to be.
And we pray for anybody who’s here this morning who’s not yet connected with you, that they would get connected with you. That they would receive the gift of life that’s found in Jesus Christ. And their hearts and their lives would be transformed like all of us long to be transformed into your image. We long for the church to represent a place of love, of genuine love, of transforming love. Help us, Lord, become more loving.
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